Johann Mendel, later known as Gregor, was born on July 20, 1822, in a small village in the Austrian Empire. Born to a poor farming family, he struggled for education but persevered, eventually joining the Augustinian monastery in Brno.

As a friar, Mendel had the freedom to pursue his scientific interests. In the monastery garden, he began his famous experiments with pea plants (Pisum sativum), carefully cross-breeding them and recording the inheritance patterns of seven distinct traits over eight years and some 29,000 plants.

Through this meticulous work, he discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance: the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment. He proposed that traits are passed on through discrete "factors" — what we now call genes.

He published his findings in 1866, but his work was largely ignored by the scientific community during his lifetime. It wasn't until the early 1900s, more than 15 years after his death, that his contributions were independently rediscovered by several scientists.

Today, Mendel is universally acknowledged as the father of genetics. His work laid the foundation for all of modern biology, from understanding hereditary diseases to the development of genetically modified crops and gene therapy.